She put her hand out to him immediately, and although it was not usually in her nature to anxiously appease a man’s hurt feelings, this was too precious an exception. Her own cruel mistakes went before her, and it was a suitable punishment that she occasionally had to humble herself to avoid repeating them.

“I wasn't staying away because of - not for the reasons you think,” she said, almost forgetting to lift her hand for him to pretend to bring it to his mouth, so focused was she on the idea of saying what needed to be said.

“I had faith,” he said quietly, but before she could even stifle the leap of joyful relief in her chest, he was reaching out with his useless hand with a gesture so gentle that she shied away from it in sudden fear, even though he could not touch her. He was reaching as if to turn her face towards him so that he could see, more clearly, what remained of her black eye.

“Lalaine,” he said after a moment, wounded, concerned for her in an open way that he had never betrayed before. “You did not stay away -”

“No. I didn't want you to see it, that's true. But only because -”

She could not finish, and did not need to.

“You still make decisions to spare my feelings,” he said, but the chiding tone was rote, and displaced by a sort of grief. “But I can sit down with the pain of being unable to help you.”

“I know. It wasn't for you. It was for me.”

“But only in a way - well. Tell me, if you will.”

“If I can tell you,” she said, fighting a sudden humiliating inclination to tears that she badly hid with a watery laugh, “then you'll be helping me plenty.”

—

What to say of the weeks after Dagon?

She had lived through an apocalypse. She had faced pain and danger reluctantly but victoriously. But Dagon - Dagon had brought her low, and it is - she has to admit it to herself as she leans on the bathroom counter - because it frightens her to look into a mirror and see her pretty face marred by something that might have been worse, or permanent, or both.

It isn't pure vanity. She is canceling appointments - losing both goodwill and money - and she is in pain. But what of it is vanity - and it is a substantial amount - she feels no shame for. Why should she not be vain? Why should she, who has fought uphill for years to be a beauty, not be shaken by a reminder that her beauty is fragile and temporary and that the immediate means of removing it is, of course, that hateful ******** conscription that dictates her life more and more? If she is increasingly going to fail to recognize herself in a metaphorical sense, is it silly to grieve and rage at a lack of recognition for her literal face?

She signs her cancellation messages Lyonesse, with a little pair of emojis: 🦁♥️. A cute little patch job.

Speaking of which. She will have to go out as early as she can tomorrow, as soon as things open, to let some shop girl or boy with too much contour help her find concealer.

—

“I like it when the driver's a girl,” her passenger says with relief in her voice.

“I always did too, when I was riding,” she says, glancing in the rearview, distracted before pulling away by checking to see how the concealer is holding up. Well enough, considering she isn't turned around to face anyone. The black eye is almost gone, anyway. She's probably being too scrupulous.

“Is your name really Leo? I was expecting an old guy. I'm sorry, you must get that a lot.”

“I do. It's ok. It's a good idea for the same reason getting a girl driver is a relief,” she says carefully.

The chatty passenger is going from the airport to her mother's house for - of course - the holiday. Notes are compared. Leo is good at putting a cheerfulness into her customer service voice that she only partly feels. The stranger likes pecan pie. Leo likes sweet potato. Dressing or stuffing. Ham or turkey.

She's had the same conversation a dozen times in the last day or so. She is starting to sympathize with Kay and his lying for the novel hell of it. Maybe pretending to be a vegan for the space of a short drive would relieve the agonizing sameness reminding her of what the year does not hold for her.

But she is not Kay, and more pointedly, she is Elaine. It's worth holding onto it, even for something as silly as reiterating for the tenth time in a day that she doesn't hate the cranberry sauce in a can, actually.

“Have a good Thanksgiving,” she says as she parks, and she means it as sincerely as she has ever meant anything, and she hates this stranger who waves a friendly, smiling wave, and who will undoubtedly give her a very good review and possibly even a bigger tip than anticipated.

The app dings, but she does not accept the trip. She signs off and she drives aimlessly through the rain and sleet, without even bothering to put on any music. She watches the streets unrolling beneath her tires through glitzy neighborhoods with bright trees in the windows already and through rundown suburbs where the inflatable Santas in the yards wilt under the weight of the rain.

She stops for convenience store coffee and gas, and while she leans against the trunk and gazes with bleak apathy over the ugly road, her internal silence is disrupted, violently, when her eyes land on a jewelry store ad plastered across the street, wherein a smiling man with Republican hair tenderly fastens a new golden necklace around his wife’s beautiful neck. She is turned as if to smile over her shoulder at him, her eyes turned towards him with adoration. It is trite and overplayed and commercial and crass, and she feels in herself a craving that has nothing to do with any gold or diamond and wracks her with the kind of envy that makes her understand why it's a sin to covet.

The rage that falls across her is loud and powerful and instantly exhausting, and it seethes through her tired heart as she heads back to her bleak, silent, undecorated apartment where even Petitcru seems unimpressed with her return and there is no one else to have missed her. It is an anger that is still growing and feeding when she is standing before the bathroom mirror and wiping color correction and meticulous concealer away, testing whether the bruise still hurts. It stirs and paces and pants within her as she sits down on the edge of her empty bed and fumbles with the clasp of her necklace, culminating in a few silent, angry tears.

She is above this petty wanting. She has always been above it. Has, even, scorned it in other people as an intolerable weakness. Loneliness is a problem for people who aren't Elaine Carlisle.

But you aren't her either, says a wretched voice, as Joyeuse Garde’s bruises ache, and Joyeuse Garde’s nightmares gather, and Joyeuse Garde’s heart cries out for what it cannot have, and will never have, and should never have existed to want.

—

He did not try again to touch her as she spoke. But she found herself forgetting instead as she finished, lifting her fingertips to the scar on his cheekbone in much the same place as the healed scrape on hers. He did, then, reach up as if to close his hand around her wrist, the gentle movement aborted as he recalled its futility.

“There's no miracle in me right now,” she said, and it was not possible in that moment to be ashamed that she said it through a choked sob.

“It will keep,” he said.

“I know. But I hate that it has to. I hate it. I hate -”

She had almost said you, carried by a moment’s rage. The first moment of softness he had ever shown her was to apologize for, as he put it, saying in anger what he did not believe.

She trembled with anxious regrets, but if he knew - and he must - he said nothing. He was too good, she knew, to make his own grief and fear for her into her problem at that moment more than she did on her own. It only doubled the desire to throw herself into his arms for a moment's selfish comfort that she could not have. Would never have. Should never have existed to want.

—

It is midnight. Thanksgiving. Her mother will call in a few hours to gently chide her for not coming home, and she will ask if she has met anyone, as she always does.

Worried, of course, that she is lonely.

She entertains, as she had in the car, the idea of spinning a story just for the sake of not having the same conversation yet again, knowing that she never will. Maybe it's not a lie to say that she has been talking to someone - he's older; quiet; yes, very very good to her - but it would be a lie of the worst kind to let her mother hang up the phone and think that Misty (Lyonesse - Leo - Elaine - Joy -) was not alone.

She will go to him that evening, her bruises mostly faded, and be hungry under any given name. She will hold her hand towards him, alone. She will speak to him, alone. And he will pretend as though he does not, like she does, inwardly pace to and fro against the glass that separates them.

Radio's on. Sun grey in the curtains. What are you thankful for this year? Bitterness will make you forget your blessings.